Tuesday, September 06, 2016

My sanguine friends, who are not Elitists and not hard-core Leftists (though they are varying degrees of what nearly everyone else is in the West, PC MC) more or less acknowledge the problem of terrorism, but evidently consider it to be a relatively stable problem which Western political and intelligence authorities are pretty much adequately handling.

That's their first problem: they think the problem is static, rather than gravely metastatic (getting horribly worse).

Their second problem: they think the problem is disparate, unorganized and random, rather than systemic (a veritable world war organized in trans-national networks and following a blueprint with a trajectory & goal leading to the destruction of the West as it is).

Their third problem is that they don't put together the first two problems and draw the reasonable (and reasonably horrifying) inference: that the trajectory of "getting worse" is aiming at a goal to destroy our civilization as it is. And even the best case scenario -- where Mohammedans do not succeed in their ultimate goal of replacing the Western order with an Islamic Caliphate -- will entail horrific, hellish violence and disorder throughout the West. A wonderful legacy for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my friends (if they care about them).

But my friends evidently don't think these three things. When they think about the problem of terrorism, they are thinking of something else, something much smaller, more stable, and more manageable; hence their relatively calm attitude about the whole thing.

And when I use the locution "they think" I don't mean they are carefully assessing the data and deliberating upon it to come to reasoned conclusions; I mean they are rather passively acquiescing to a conclusion which the mainstream media and mainstream politicians convey -- a conclusion that is comforting (the problem is stable, not alarmingly metastasizing according to a blueprint whose goal is the destruction of our society) and that seems reasonable because it's not compelling one to step outside of one's sociological Box by thinking thoughts that are against the normative grain.

Part of the reason my friends are so sanguine about the problem of terrorism is that they've never digested the full enumeration of terror attacks, both the ones that happened and the ones that have been plotted, but stopped in time (sometimes by sheer luck). Most people, including myself, have not seen a complete tally of all the terror attacks accomplished by Muslims and all the terror attacks plotted by Muslims that were foiled by authorities -- even over the relatively small slice of time of the past 15 years. What people like me do is pay attention to this growing problem, spend a few dozen hours over those years reading from sources that shine a light on the problem (rather than obscure it by embedding it in distracting or irrelevant contexts & analyses), then we draw reasonable inferences from and connect dots among the oceans of incomplete data we have absorbed.

For example, I can visit the website well-known in CJM (Counter-Jihad Mainstream) circles, TheReligionofPeace.com, which lists all the reported, successful terror attacks that have occurred (and are still occurring) world-wide in the name of Islam. As valuable as that site is, it doesn't present the full horror of Islam -- for it leaves uncounted the hundreds of terror plots over the years that could have been successful, had not authorities stopped them in time. Example, just this past week (the last week of August, 2016):

In France, the French intelligence authorities nabbed and deported two Moroccan Muslims who had "been ordered to co-ordinate a number of large-scale terrorist
attacks in France, during which he would officially pledge allegiance to
ISIS."

Or in Italy, in the same month, when Bilel Chihaoui, a Moroccan Muslim plotted to blow up the Leaning Tower of Pisa as well as other landmarks in that Tuscan city.

There have been literally hundreds of such plots by Mohammedans over the years, throughout the West. None of them get tallied by the Religion of Peace website (and certainly don't get reported adequately by the mainstream media). But they should be part of our general tally of terror, because they point to the ongoing motive that motivates those who wish to kill us, are assiduously trying to kill us, with the eventual aim to destroy our societies.

And even among the terror statistics which the Religion of Peace website does tally, they admit to lacunae. On their website, their explanatory page "About the List of Attacks" indicates that their list, as horrifyingly massive as it is, is but one icy crag of a much broader, deeper iceberg toward which the West's Titanic chugs along heedlessly:

This list of terrorist attacks committed by Muslims since 9/11/01 (a
rate of
about five a day) is incomplete because not all such
attacks are picked up by international news sources, even those
resulting in
multiple loss of life.

These are not incidents of ordinary crime involving nominal Muslims
killing for money or vendetta. We
only include
incidents of deadly violence that are reasonably determined to have been committed out of
religious duty - as
interpreted by the perpetrator. Islam needs to be a motive, but it need
not be the only factor.

We usually list only attacks resulting in loss of
life (with a handful of exceptions). In several cases, the deaths are
undercounted because deaths from trauma caused by the Islamists may occur in
later days, despite the best efforts of medical personnel to keep the victims
alive.

In 2014, the BBC did a
thorough analysis of Islamic terror attacks occurring during the month of
November. They found 664 attacks and 5,042 deaths. Our list has only
284 attacks and 2,515 deaths for that month, meaning that we
undercounted the true extent of Islamic terror by a significant
margin.

The further report from their BBC link reported these further, disturbing details:

The data gathered by the BBC
found that 5,042 people were killed in 664 jihadist attacks across 14
countries - a daily average of 168 deaths, or seven every hour.

About
80% of the deaths came in just four countries - Iraq, Nigeria, Syria
and Afghanistan, according to the study of media and civil society
reports.

Iraq was the most dangerous place to be, with 1,770 deaths in 233 attacks, ranging from shootings to suicide bombings.

An interesting caveat the Religion of Peace includes is this:

We usually don't include incidents related to combat,
such as in Iraq and Afghanistan [and one assumes other "combat" zones of "bloody borders" in the Philippines, Thailand, and various African countries], unless it involves particularly heinous
terror tactics, such as suicide bombings or attacks on troops sleeping in their
barracks or providing medical care to the local population....Unfortunately, this list of Muslim terrorist attacks
barely scratches the surface of atrocities committed in
the name of Islam occurring world-wide each day. For that reason, we
don't tally up the dead and
dismembered, except on a weekly and monthly basis.

Beyond the quantitative tally -- which again, very few will be able to digest thoroughly, simply because there are too many -- there is a certain amount of self-education one does in this issue where one gets to the point that one is able to supply the "connective tissue" (as Frank Gaffney puts it) capable of connecting the seemingly disparate ocean of dots. Part of this self-education involves reading the Jihad Watch website daily for years. As I say, one doesn't have to spend an enormous amount of time at Jihad Watch; one can just breeze through the headlines there and only occasionally dip into a story that catches the eye and pulls one in to want to read more, and maybe even following a link or two. Some days one may merely visit the site for 10 or 15 minutes. Other days, perhaps longer. What occurs to the open mind upon a daily diet of Jihad Watch over weeks, months, years, is that it sinks in that this is a global, systemic, metastasizing problem. My occasional series, "Lake Mobegone", has tried to convey this stunningly disturbing enumeration of fanatical violence.

Further reading and video-watching of other analysts -- including ex-Muslims and Middle Eastern Christians and intelligent individuals who have spent years in Muslim countries -- puts this growing mountain, or volcano of data, into a framework: the framework of a concerted, albeit seemingly disparate & disconnected, global revival of Islamic jihad. Historical knowledge about Islam further illuminates this as having a continuity with one long, ultimate jihad against the West spanning centuries, right back to the beginning in the 7th century.